Vetifieds

Inspiration

One of our team members, Ryan Morris, is a Veteran and he noticed that one of the largest issues with Veteran resources are mostly involved around marketing and executing efficiently. On top of that one of the most disorienting events for Veterans is to leave the military after several years of service. The systems in place range in support for ETS'ing veterans and are often not well planned out.

What it does

Vetifieds creates a network that is built around local community interaction and involvement with veterans. Rather than going through a vast, discombobulating, amount of local, county, state and federal organizations just to get to the resources or guidance they need, Vetifieds offers a local network of professionals, community leaders and other veterans to support and guide our veteran community.

How we built it

We built Vetifieds with scalabilty in mind and focused on constructing a highly modularilized code base. We used a gulp setup that takes incorporates of ES2015 to keep our code up to date and other build tool delegations such as pre-processing CSS and jshint. We used bcrypt to secure our users information and protect routes that are for veterans only. Finally, our database is constructed with MongoDB and Mongoose.

Challenges we ran into

We used technologies that many members of our team were not fully familiar with such as gulp and Angular. This created some issues in the beginning setting up our build environments and getting everyone coding. We worked with a designer to create a user friendly site that is easy to use for older and younger veterans alike. However, due to time constraints it was difficult meeting creating the designers vision. Finally, we got really into the project and had to rein ourselves in as we were ready to take on way too much.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our code is up to date and uses some of the latest technologies and practices. Even though this was the first time we used the gulp build tool we were able to work our way through the issues and produce a functional product.

What we learned

Pre-planning is important. If you are going to use unfamiliar technologies you should plan ahead to set aside some time to get everyone up to speed and environments set up. Save time for documentation and deployment.

What's next for Vetifieds

Keep coding and working on Vetifieds until the vision our team imagined comes fully to life!